Sunday, February 22, 2009

The Reader: A Pernicious Book and Movie

Let's get this out of the way at the outset: Kate Winslet gives a great performance in The Reader and the book is a decent but airy read [if you ignore the premise].

Now let's get on to substance. The basic premise of the book and the movie are deeply troubling. Note that the Nazi camp guard is portrayed as the poor, simple, caring woman.

Are we supposed to feel sorry for her because she could not read and had "no choice" but to be a guard? She could have been a street sweeper. She did not have "no choice."

Furthermore, the book and movie suggests that the perpetrators were poor ignorant people. This is such a misstatement of fact and the author, Bernard Schlink, as a German knows better.

Many of the leading perpetrators had Ph.D.s or were clergy and lawyers. They were well educated and quite literate. [In fact, certain section of the party specifically sought out well educated people.]

Finally, note the sharp contrast drawn by the survivor -- very rich [note the maid, the stretch limo, and the art work] and adament in her refusal to offer forgiveness or absolution -- and the poor guard who has nothing. Who is the victim, according to Schlink, here???*

This is a rewriting of history. It is, simply put, soft core denial. It does not deny the reality or the horror of the Holocaust. Not at all. But it does deny who was responsible.

Because it is so slippery I consider it a pernicious book and movie.

[Thanks to Dr. Leah Wolfson, my -- I am proud to say -- former student and now at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for thinking this through with me. She pointed out that the book/movie seem to want to suggest that literature is redemptive which we know is not necessarily the case.]

* Case in point: a friend who saw the movie said he did felt really sorry Hannah and was sort of rooting for her.... [granted that this friend is at all well versed in the history of the Holocaust].

Has the author Bernhard Schlinck responded to any of these criticisms? I am surprised that this sort of narrative of the 'poor, downtrodden German' still is repeated over and over. As far as I know Bernhard Schlinck was a journalist before getting into fiction and was born during WWII or just before.

"Note that the Nazi camp guard is portrayed as the poor, simple, caring woman. "No, she is a simple stupid molester of young boys, actually. She never thought about her past. Why should she for she was never forced to do so like Rudolph Hoess was. Hoess was a major cog in the wheel.I don't think you are supposed to be sorry for her. The only sorrow I felt was that the other women didn't get the same punishment. The sorrow I felt for Hanna is that she had to be brought up at that time in German history.The main character even let her go to her punishment. So that must say something about him doesn't it?"Many of the leading perpetrators had Ph.D.s or were clergy and lawyers."However she was not a leading perpetrator. She was a minor murderer and admitted it on the stand. Irma Grese was around the same age and was educated through age 15 when she lead the women's camp at Birkenau and then tortured more people at Bergen-Belsen. Think a little bit Ms. Lipstadt.Grese was a murderer as well and was brought up in the same Nazi culture as was our main character here. Grese was hung by the English, but there were further Auschwitz Trials that most Americans know nothing about in the 1960s. This was a topic of the book you also might consider. Germans then publically had to deal with there past. This was a part of the story.You ask who the victom was in a venomous way. The visitms were the people burned on a death march, the surviver of that fire, the judges, the main character, and each and every German who had to ask the hard questions. Including the Hanna the guard who hung herself after 20 years in jail. Remember the other women got 4.I think you need to re-think your blast here.Mike Curtis

"Note that the Nazi camp guard is portrayed as the poor, simple, caring woman. "No, she is a simple stupid molester of young boys, actually. She never thought about her past. Why should she for she was never forced to do so like Rudolph Hoess was. Hoess was a major cog in the wheel.I don't think you are supposed to be sorry for her. The only sorrow I felt was that the other women didn't get the same punishment. The sorrow I felt for Hanna is that she had to be brought up at that time in German history.The main character even let her go to her punishment. So that must say something about him doesn't it?"Many of the leading perpetrators had Ph.D.s or were clergy and lawyers."However she was not a leading perpetrator. She was a minor murderer and admitted it on the stand. Irma Grese was around the same age and was educated through age 15 when she lead the women's camp at Birkenau and then tortured more people at Bergen-Belsen. Think a little bit Ms. Lipstadt.Grese was a murderer as well and was brought up in the same Nazi culture as was our main character here. Grese was hung by the English, but there were further Auschwitz Trials that most Americans know nothing about in the 1960s. This was a topic of the book you also might consider. Germans then publically had to deal with there past. This was a part of the story.You ask who the victom was in a venomous way. The visitms were the people burned on a death march, the surviver of that fire, the judges, the main character, and each and every German who had to ask the hard questions. Including the Hanna the guard who hung herself after 20 years in jail. Remember the other women got 4.I think you need to re-think your blast here.Mike Curtis

You are right. In fact, writing in the London Times in 2002, Gabriel Josipovici said Schlink's The Reader was "a badly written, sentimental and morally outrageous book", Graham Chainey called it "a clever exercise in moral prestidigitation",Jeremy Adler said it was "a mixture of half-truths and distortions ... a potent form of Kulturpornographie", and Frédéric Raphael said: "Schlink's fiction ... is the spurious fruit of canting condescension: the fraudulous use of 'art' to preen oneself".

Recently there was trouble over the movie "Life is Beautifull". In the early sixties there was a bigger scrap over Hannah Arendt's EICHMAN IN JERUSALEM.

All three controversies have this in common: They show the dire importance of the victims controlling the narrative of their own persecution.

Hollywood is ever hungry for new and outrageous ways to present death and danger. If we are not careful they will re-write holocaust history. Satan doesn't need Robert Faurisson as long as he has Hollywood.

Remember, Schindler's List ended up by becoming the central joke on a Seinfeld episode. I wonder did anyone ever take Larry David to task.

The motion picture industry is the most powerful influence on minds today. The danger is real.

Somehow an official version of holocaust history must be written and canonized as "WHAT HAPPENED". It may take years to develop this but without it a pop culture revisionism will overwhelm historical truth.

Maybe we need a law which says the topic can't be touched on T.V. or in Hollywood without the imput of a professor of Holocaust Studies.

I know this offends the civil liberties instincts of many but it may be necessary.

Again, let me ride my hobby horse. Your best friends are Catholics. We've been comfortable with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum for centuries. The Legion of Decency provided this function for decades.

"The sorrow I felt for Hanna is that she had to be brought up at that time in German history."

Yeah, too bad for the Jews who were "brought up at that time in German history." What is your point?

I'm finding it difficult comprehending what is, specifically, the reason behind your reproof of Prof. Lipstadt. Because she reminded us who the real victims were? The real victims she refers to are the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust.

You have a problem with Prof. Lipstadt's passionate feelings toward her fellow Jews? There is nothing "venomous" about her question. Passionate yes (a passion I can so effortlessly understand), but "venomous"? Give me a break. Your criticisms I find rather excoriative and something Prof. Lipstadt is undeserving of.

What did you expect from such a blog as this? A discussion page for the purpose of reuniting former Ukranian camp guards? Or maybe a place to send our condolences to all those unlucky, church-going German civilians, who volunteered for the Einsatzgruppen units, so as to remind them that life is not really so bad now after murdering all those Jewish men, women and children.

I don't give a shit about the camp guards who hung themselves. I don't feel one bit sorry for them or because of the fact they felt some measure of guilt before they died. At least they had the opportunity to recognize their guilt and acknowledge it. The Jews they helped to herd into the gas chambers and gas vans and fire pits and mass graves could find no apparent reason for the genocide being inflicted upon them by these Germans and Poles and Lithuanians and Ukranians and Latvians and Croatians and Hungarians, etc.

Your use of the word "venomous" in describing Prof. Lipstadt's question is, as the Irish would say, mighty odd.

Perhaps I should re-think my blast?

"It always must be remembered that more than 90 percent of those who lost their lives at Auschwitz did so because the one 'crime' they had committed in the Nazis' eyes was to be born Jewish."-Laurence Rees, from 'Auschwitz (a new history)'

Me: "The sorrow I felt for Hanna is that she had to be brought up at that time in German history."

You:Yeah, too bad for the Jews who were "brought up at that time in German history." What is your point?

I'm finding it difficult comprehending what is, specifically, the reason behind your reproof of Prof. Lipstadt. Because she reminded us who the real victims were? The real victims she refers to are the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. "

Whoever you are "Hockey Hound" I signed my real name. You are a little far off the mark with me. I've been debunking Holocaust deniers for a couple of decades. I even heklped some with Lipstadt's trial, as best I could, against Irving.

I'm fully aware of the victims of the Holocaust and the holocaust as well. You probably are not well versed in the socialology of dictatorships and those who had to live among them and educated among them. I'm just *assuming* based upon your words as well as you foul language. There were millions innocent victims during the 2nd World war and around 6 million Jews were among them.

Research is now being done on the perpetrators and they are asking why and what kinds of people they were. Elizabeth Harvey has done some study on perpetrators. So if you do not want to repeatr such events we need to dig down deeper and see the atmosphere they were living in.

The other part of the book are the children of Germans who did nothing during the Thrid Reich. Some of this is coming out recently about the Children of these Germans.

I realize you "don't care" about other people, but if you look within you might find yourself thinking like a perpetrator.

"You are a little far off the mark with me. I've been debunking Holocaust deniers for a couple of decades."

I still don't understand the gist of your post addressing Prof. Lipstadt's comments.

"You probably are not well versed in the socialology of dictatorships and those who had to live among them and educated among them. I'm just *assuming* based upon your words as well as you foul language."

Well, hey, we all don't have the backbone to carry around the burden of unusual mental ability. I'm just *assuming* based on your pronouncements.

"I even heklped some with Lipstadt's trial, as best I could, against Irving."

Good for you, but if Curtis is your real name, I cannot find it in the index of History On Trial.

"I even helped some with Lipstadt's trial, as best I could, against Irving."

You: Good for you, but if Curtis is your real name, I cannot find it in the index of History On Trial.

Not everyone get credit by name. A group of us collected information for Mr. Mazal. How it was used or ever used, I don't know.

I think you should re-read what I wrote and look into the links I sent. You are all hopped up about a book of fiction invovling sigular characters and is not saying anything generally.

Let's suppose those other accused were the more educated ones and they obviously were. In the book she is taken advantage of to make their involvement less in the court's eyes. So those who should have gotten life, as well as her, did not.

The book is more abour the German recognition with the past and it denies nothing! We are dealing with two things here, the movie, and a book. One is not the other.

A fiction book is not to be meant as history either. "The Nast" girl movie (loosely based on a true story) is one to see and also "The Last Day of Sophie Scholl."

If you are unable to separate the two and look at people as human and thus vulerable to their era then you are a young person indeed.

Hopped up? Excuse me? You're the blogger accusing Prof. Lipstadt of asking questions in a "venomous way," that she should "think a little bit." This is courteous? Is this the way you address someone who put her entire career on the line in order to refute David Irving in court? She should think a little bit? She asks questions in a venomous way? Who's acting like a child here (or a sciolist)?

My post was about your statements regarding Prof. Lipstadt's critique and had very little relevance with the book itself (I'd never heard of it before reading Prof. Lipstadt's critique on it). Why are you telling me I'm "young indeed"(I wish!!)? Is this also an insult?

"Maybe we need a law which says the topic can't be touched on T.V. or in Hollywood without the imput of a professor of Holocaust Studies."

It probably would not work. Hollywood never lets the facts get the way of a good story. As Darryl F Zanuck said "There is nothing duller on the screen than being accurate but not dramatic." and this from the director of the Longest Day, a much more historically accurate film of the D-Day invasion than other more popular films like Saving Pvt. Ryan.

Film productions often hire historical or technical advisors and then proceed to ignore them. Disney ignored the astronauts they hired to advise on their film "The Black Hole." Ridley Scott is famous for telling his advisors (I paraphrase) "If you can not prove to me that the Romans did not have this (or that) then I can use it." Thus we end up with a film like Gladiator --very entertaining but a complete distortion of Roman history from the uniforms of the Praetorians to the death of the emperor Commodus.

You are quite right, film is an supremely powerful medium and must be used (by both maker and viewer) with care.